Gerry Cambridge recalls the beautiful austerity of his early days, when he lived in a caravan in rural Ayrshire and wrote poetry — alongside articles for Reader’s Digest. His monkish inclinations, he discovered, had limits.
When she began dramatising the stories of present-day refugees seeking to enter Europe, Clare Bayley discovered the truth about her own mother’s experiences as a refugee fleeing war in Europe.
Shanty-singing, bustle-wearing, wreath-laying, street parties, a campaign for lifeboats — her book about the Victorian reformer Samuel Plimsoll led the writer and journalist Nicolette Jones to embark on activities she never expected.
Bird-lovers note the arrivals of the cuckoo and swallow, in summer, with joy. But for connoisseurs, encounters with Britain’s winter visitors can be still more wonderful. Jonathan Tulloch listens in to an avian world that plays in a minor key.
Since Shakespeare delighted Elizabeth I by giving Sir John Falstaff his own play, characters from stories have often had afterlives — existences outside the works that gave birth to them. John Pilkington argues that appropriating a character, and turning him or her into someone new, is very different from writing a mere sequel.
For her latest novel, Karin Altenberg set out to experience the Missouri River as Lewis and Clark would have known it, on their epic mission to cross the US continent in 1804. Her journey took her somewhere unexpected — to an old fort and an electric chair.
Thomson and Martinet’s classic manual of English grammar is ‘dull without shame or compromise’. Yet it changed Harry Ritchie’s life — and he believes it can change the lives of other native English-speakers and writers, too.
Lucy Jago’s passion for a long-dead Norwegian physics professor led her to the top of a mountain in the Arctic Circle, watching the play of the Northern Lights at minus 30 degrees Celsius. And this from a woman who never liked science, and never meant to be a writer.
Audiobooks are for non-readers, thought Katharine Grant — before she tried them and fell under their spell. Now, reading Joyce, she has become ‘one of those laughing walkers you instinctively avoid’; reading Edmund de Waal, she is a woman who cries at the supermarket checkout.
When he first saw the ruined cottage, as an eleven-year-old, Cynan Jones vowed to buy it one day. He finally did so; and now, restoring it, he finds himself making oddly writerly decisions about what to leave and what to strip away.